How to export image in CRI-O?

Question

Both docker and containerd provide golang clients and provide some interfaces, such as list images, export images or tag images. How can this be done in cri-o? eg: github.com/containerd/containerd and github.com/docker/docker/client

Answer 1

it seemed logical to me that such an option would be present for such a simple need, searched around and it seems it's a wanted feature but not fulfilled as it seems by these issues 1 2 3. there is some sense to this since crictl was destined to be a debugging to cri-o and not a container management tool.

from personal use, if you prefer switching from docker, podman could be an option for such operations, it's a daemon-less alternative to docker and cri-o, and employs other opensource tools to achieve its goals:

buildah - handles building and manipulating container images

skopeo - registry specific tasks relating to container images handling (probably the first candidate for your use case even by itself)

If you want to stick to the popular CLI commands podman is your guy, if you want to go as minimalist as possible, using skopeo directly could be an option

hope this helps you in your decision-making process ;)